In the small hours of Friday morning negotiators and the hardiest observers set about devouring the new draft text of the soon-to-be Paris Agreement. Soon a buzz was building around Le Bourget’s cavernous halls: what were all these strange phrases littering the text, references to flying through fluffy clouds, giving a speech naked and sitting an exam when you haven’t revised the subject matter?

In some instances changes in style were abrupt: “…Notes with concern that the estimated aggregate greenhouse gas emission levels resulting from the intended nationally determined contributions in 2025 and 2030 do not fall within least-cost 2˚C scenarios, and that flying through white fluffly clouds I see my life playing out far below me and that much greater emission reduction efforts than those associated with the intended nationally determined contributions will be required in the period after 2025 and 2030”.

A hasty press conference was called and the UNFCCC Secretariat was forced to admit that as the drafters faced their second straight nuit blanche, they had been drifting in and out of sleep and accidentally adding random sequences of their dreams into the text they were editing. Along with the fluffy clouds and naked speech entries, some equally fantastical dream sequences seemed to have slipped into the text, such as “limiting global warming to 1.5C”.

The sleep-deprived hallucinations were not confined to the written text. Those still awake at 5am on Friday allegedly heard Peru’s Minister Pulgar-Vidal concocting a vivid sleep-deprived hallucination of red lines becoming a red road and a red carpet; it was only when he jolted upright that the smattering of delegates still awake realised that he, too, had been sleep-talking. Another delegate, surreptitiously snoozing in plenary with her head resting on a microphone stand, woke up with a start and exclaimed, “I was having this crazy dream! We were at the Paris COP and it was being magnificently managed by the French delegation, we were near the end of the second week and had there had been no histrionics, no brinkmanship breakdown, and we were even making progress on a strong text!”. “But that’s what’s actually happening” said her neighbour from the country coming next in the alphabet. “Are you sure? Because in the dream we had agreed on undifferentiated commitments, had secured a compensation mechanism for loss and damage, and Laurent Fabius was wearing nothing but a superman cape”. “Ah ok, so you really were dreaming”.

The meditation room before its nightly onslaught. (Photo: IISD)

Elsewhere the EU delegation was reportedly going through their own internal negotiation about who was going to be first for a stint in the delegation office beds – with first priority going to those suddenly breaking down into existential panics of “why am I here? what does it all MEAN? and what is a transferable mitigation outcome anyway??”. Other less well provided-for delegations saw a sudden increase in religious fervour among their delegations, with the “meditation room” becoming increasingly popular (and what happens in the meditation room, stays in the meditation room).

Meanwhile not even the oversize polar bear terrorising the entrance to the talks was surprised at the announcement that talks would over-run into Saturday, with climate journalists pushing out their “climate talks into overtime as issues of finance and trust dominate” articles that they penned in anticipation last week or even last year.

As negotiators entered their third straight night of intense discussions, millions will be waiting to see what levels of creativity and hallucinatory sleep-deprivation will be produced by Saturday morning.

As climate finance discussions rumble on at COP21, the Green Climate Fund has begun to despair at ever having its coffers properly filled. The GCF board, forever disappointed with the level of developed country funding, has at last found a new way to capitalise the fund – gathering up left over coffee cups around the COP21 centre. The fancy cups, all handed out on a €1 deposit-refund scheme, have been absent-mindedly jettisoned by observers and delegates alike. Hawk-eyed GCF employees, accompanied by willing volunteers from developing countries have been gradually amassing the necessary fortune, €1 at a time.

Meanwhile, observers and negotiators alike have been baffled the lavishness of India’s on-site pavilion. While it has become the norm for most countries, small and large, to create their own stands or “pavilions” during COPs, nothing as grandiose as India’s elaborate construction has ever before graced a negotiating hall. As negotiators contemplate delicate issues of equity, climate justice and financial commitments by traditionally rich countries, the robotic water feature – quite literally sending messages about India’s technological advancement – certainly provides an interesting if rather damp backdrop.

Unbeknown to most of them, delegates at COP21 are acting as guinea-pigs for a new French theme-park, it has emerged. When the climate talks finally conclude, the sprawling conference site will complete its transformation into a one-stop-shop for tourists wanting to live out their fantasies of what imagine France to be like, without having to confront the modern realities of the country itself. The new park will provide easy consumption of the best things that this wonderful country has to offer, without any of the inconvenience. In go the culinary delights, beautiful monuments and grandiose infrastructure. Out go the soaring unemployment, National Front rallies and ghetto-like suburbs (though the latter are just across the fence). Faced with a dent in tourism following the terror attacks in Paris, the government hopes the park could become a means for France to win back wary visitors. All just a short air-conditioned ride from the country’s main airport.

Bonjour! A theme park performer trials his wares (photo @pilitaclark)

Many of the future park’s features are already in place. COP delegates are right now sampling the delights of cheery white-hatted bakers busily making bread, various stands selling raclette, vin chaud and crepes, and
countless restaurants churning out choucroute, cassoulet, boeuf bourginon and other regional delicacies washed down with a carafe of vin rouge. After a culturally long lunch, the thousands of observers who tire of hearing the same people say the same things again and again at COP side events, can instead go out and take selfies in front of the model Eiffel Tower. Officials have hinted that this may be just the first of many future model French monuments, with Mont St Michel planned for early 2016 and a scale-model of Mont Blanc to follow after that. A decision on whether to include the Mer de Glace glacier on that is pending the outcome of this week’s negotiations.

Anyone for raclette?

Other rumours abound for possible future uses of the gloriously over-sized conference centre, with delegates and tax-payers alike wondering why the host government invested scarce cash in luxurious facilities that feel about twice as big as necessary to host the 50,000 or so delegates. The COP21 village is in fact so large that entire corridors are often eerily empty and observers can wander idly for hours with no risk of running into their bosses. Despite several expeditions nobody has yet discovered where the perimeter of the site lies. One group of delegates set out on foot to explore the northern part of the site and soon found themselves at the entrance to the Channel Tunnel, where they were promptly arrested.

One of the centre’s eerily empty corridors

One rumour circulating is that the cavernous corridors of the massive site will be converted to a massive particle accelerator. One veteran observer pointed out this would be a suitable use as the UN climate change talks and the Large Hadron Collider are the only two ventures known to science where humankind aims to create parallel alternative realities.

“The road to Paris” was the tired cliché tirelessly rolled out again and again by journalists and climate wonks in the run up to this week’s COP21 climate conference. But that road is now officially closed. And the metro train to Paris isn’t faring much better.

With COP21 finally upon us, France has announced an innovative means of offsetting the greenhouse gas emissions generated by the conference: getting the Paris region’s 12 million residents to sit at home and avoid driving for a couple of days.

A spokesperson for the conference said that the emissions generated by the conference – including flights, on-site energy use and production of several million croissants – would be precisely offset by closing two major motorways into the city, half of the peripherique ring-road and a handful of major roads through the city centre. When challenged that this might not be quite enough to offset all the emissions generated from extra cheese consumption during the fortnight, the authorities decided to throw in public transport too, heavily encouraging all the capital region’s residents to neither take their car nor hop on the metro. In a classically gallic communications mix-up one official was announcing that public transport would be free during the road closures while another was imploring people not to take it. The irony that this is rather similar to the way that all governments of the world continue to subsidise fossil fuels while at the same time calling for emissions reductions, was not lost on seasoned observers.

In some cases the authorities have taken draconian measures to enforce this planned avoidance of emissions, for example by placing a number of key climate activists under house arrest. With Paris’s law enforcement stretched to breaking point this weekend, the use of scant resources to protect a few pacifist greenies seems extraordinarily heavy-handed*.

And as Chinese president Xi Jinping touches down in Paris, it appears his government is showing a sign of goodwill by adopting a similar measure at home – insisting that Beijing residents stay inside to avoid the suffocating smog.

So with the French and Chinese capitals’ residents holed up at home doing their bit for avoided emissions, the world’s heads of state will start to roll in and enjoy the unprecedented spectacle of driving around the peripherique without being aggressively klaxoned off the road or even stuck in traffic. Interviewed on arrival in Paris, one world leader was asked how good were the chances of a strong climate deal. “Climate?” he said “What a strange question. We’re not here for that. We’re here to talk about terrorism and the middle-east, and to show that we’re not afraid of Kalashnikov-waving barbarians, nor of Vladimir Putin”. When pressed on the issue, he conceded that there might also be some climate discussion but that “most of that negotiation’s already happened” and “we’ll fly out on Monday and leave it to the little people to thrash out a few details on financing for developing countries and how often we purportedly promise to revise our targets”.

Pooh shoes: the source of the strange odour around République has yet to be identified

Meanwhile in another part of Paris locals have started to complain of a different sort of emissions problem. During the small hours of Sunday morning a cheesy odour began to emanate from the hallowed cobbles of the Place de la République. Interviewed on local TV this morning, resident Jacinthe LeFromage noted “At first I thought it was just the usual camembert aroma from the Sunday market but quickly it became unbearable”. Links to the installation of thousands of pairs of Parisians’ shoes at République are so far unconfirmed. But by lunchtime the statue of the Madeleine was said to be visibly wrinkling up her nose.

[*But, that said, what were these people thinking? The blood stains on Paris’s streets are barely dry and yet they moan about political conspiracy and having their voices silenced, simply because the government doesn’t want to risk more people being unnecessarily gunned down in the streets of the city of love? Yes public pressure on climate change is hugely important and has been massively influential this year (think Keystone XL and the Chinese government running scared over air pollution). But one more march, miles away from the conference centre and the heads of state, is not going to make much difference. Especially with gun-toting crazies seemingly still ready to strike at any moment. If we need one thing from COP21 above all else, it’s for no more blood to be spilt on these ancient streets.]

As the world’s climate negotiators reconvened in Bonn this week it quickly became apparent that the dates of this session had been deliberately chosen to coincide with so-called “Back to the Future day“.

Fans of the 1989 film Back to the Future II will remember that the intrepid time traveller Marty McFly leapt forward in time to the precise date of 21 October, 2015. In a little-known scene that did not make the final cut of the movie, a bemused McFly accidentally rides his hover-board into a stuffy UN conference hall in the middle of climate negotiations. At first shocked by the paucity of the wifi signal of the future, he soon becomes agog to discover that in 2015, over 25 years since the world woke-up to the dangers of climate change, negotiators were still banging on with the same old entrenched positions and flimsy national excuses for non-action.

On day 2 of the negotiations in Bonn this week negotiators decided to re-enact the scene as a mark of respect to this great landmark of cinematic culture. Although the planned entrance of Christiana Figueres on a hoverboard dressed as McFly had to be cancelled due to technical issues, the rest of the reenactment went ahead more-or-less as scheduled. Many Parties chose to react to the succinct and progressive draft negotiating text by returning to long-held positions and clinging on to ancient ideologies around national interest. They also insisted on taking most of the negotiations back into confidential sessions, closed to observers. This caused consternation among the ranks of NGO representatives, many of whom had worked hard to justify their essential trip to Bonn but now found themselves with little more to do than try out the World Conference Centre’s very scarce coffee facilities.

Meanwhile, the build-up to COP21 grinds on, the hype and tensions rising everyday in a seemingly endless and excruciatingly drawn-out media circus. The length and breadth of the COP build-up is matched only by the interminable length of the Rugby World Cup, an event so extreme in its long-and-drawn-outedness that pundits are starting to wonder whether the current tournament will be finished before the next World Cup begins in four years’ time.

The unfolding VW exhaust emissions scandal has not caused widespread astonishment across the car industry as the world doesn’t discover for the first time that diesel cars spew out horrible smelly pollution, just like they always have done. As the world’s media gleefully “revealed” the extent of diesel’s muckiness, the non-finding was quickly confirmed by transport experts as well as millions of ordinary people who have happened to find themselves standing behind a diesel car at traffic lights at some point in their lives.

Regulators world-wide are now scrambling to catch up and to develop new testing measures to beat the cheats. The European Commission quickly came out with the new “olfactory nose-related testing cycle” where volunteers with big noses are asked to stand behind cars and say if they smell horrible. If they do, the car fails its NOx and particulate emissions tests.

In the meantime everyone on TV has suddenly become an expert on car emissions. Commentators on TV and radio were soon spouting nearly as much rubbish as a VW tailpipe, merrily mixing their NOx with their N2O with their GHG with their BMW. Other facets of the story were seemingly too good to be true. A member of the VW board really is called Mr Olaf Lies (though rumours that his middle name is Damned and that his wife is called Statistics are as yet unconfirmed).

It remains to be seen whether the impact on car buyers will be felt. Speaking from a gas station forecourt in Texas, one potential car buyer say “Why’s everyone going about Nox? I think they mean the Red Nox. That’s a European baseball team”. Others conceded that they had heard about this pollution thing but it didn’t matter because they’ll be sitting inside the car and not outside of it, so why should they care? Back in Europe a poll of average first-time car buyers ranked “tailpipe emissions” as the 98th most important criterion out of 100 when buying a car, squeaking in just above the colour of the bolts holding the chassis together and the waxiness of the salesman’s moustache.

In other news, it has been rumoured that the England rugby team has also been fitted with a so-called “defeat device”, said to self-activate under any high-pressure world cup match scenario.

[In all seriousness, experts ranging from the stuffy bureaucracy of the OECD to the agile NGO Transport and Environment have been banging on for years about the lunacy of giving tax breaks to drivers of diesel cars. Perhaps now somebody will listen]

Years of delicate negotiations on sustainable development culminated in the rapturous adoption of the world’s new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by the UN General Assembly last week. Politicians, activists and even the Pope were quick to applaud the breadth and depth of this exhaustive pantheon of 17 goals and 169 targets. But following the summit it has been revealed that the list of goals and accompanying targets is so long and drawn-out that merely printing the full list once over will require a sizeable chunk of Amazon rainforest to be converted to paper. Speaking to journalists while heaving a pallet loaded with office paper towards an overheating printer unit, one UN bureaucrat said that while the final SDG document is approximately the same length as the Koran, the Bible and the Torah put together, it contains more commandments and moral guidance than all three combined.

In light of this discovery, the UN is expected to issue a formal warning that if all interested parties were to print hard copies of the SDGs, the resulting paper demand would immediately put in danger the goal relating to ending deforestation. On the plus side, it has been estimated that the multitude of UN-funded consultant contracts likely to flow in the aftermath of SDG adoption could be so numerous as to provide a noticeable boost to both the employment and “reducing poverty” goals. After all, the UN, governments and just about everybody will be trying to figure out exactly what all these goals and targets mean, what should be done about them and whether they will make a real difference.

Climate negotiators reconvened in Bonn this month for another round of sausages and procedural wrangling, as their December date with destiny and the global spotlight hurtles ever closer. This time all eyes were initially on the newly presented “Tool”. The what? The Tool put forward by the co-chairs of the main negotiating forum as a means to bridge disagreements in the negotiations. Cleverly disguised as looking like any other 83-page UN document, the Tool quickly whipped up strong options on all sides.

As often happens in the hot-house of multilateral negotiations, cultural misunderstandings about the new device quickly started to take their toll. Switzerland began the discussion by laying out its resolutely practical suggestion that the tool should be designed to incorporate a seemingly impossible number of smaller tools cleverly folded up inside a neat red case. They stressed that this collection of appendages must always include a strange pointy one with a hooked end, the one that generations of children have not known what to do but which is allegedly intended for removing stones from horses’ hooves.

Getting closer to a Shakespearean tool

The United States quickly took umbrage with the word “tool” due to its negative connotation in their country as slang for an idiot or fool. Despite this reservation, the US delegate stressed that the co-chair’s tool was nevertheless very impressive in its length and form and was a model for others to look up to. At this the United Kingdom delegation disintegrated into fits of uncontrollable giggles, between which they barely recovered enough to explain that their poor American cousins had lost sight of the Shakespearean origins of “tool” as a reference to a sensitive part of the male anatomy. The double mirth of the accidental innuendo and the Americans’ literary shortcomings was simply too much to bear for the usually sardonic Brits.

Having followed this scene with an increasingly confused look, France, incoming COP presidency, took to the floor to note that they had never really understood why the word “tool” had been used at all, given that in their understanding it refers simply to someone of above average height. After all this a veteran NGO observer took the floor, when finally allowed to do so an hour after the session had been scheduled to finish, and proudly showed off his Tool t-shirt, remarking that while he appreciated the tribute to his favourite 90s metal band, climate change was a savagely urgent problem that warranted more than bureaucratic bickering over language.

Away from this important tool-related business, other negotiators found themselves being “sent off to preamble”. Rather than some sort of meditational or philosophical nirvana, this referred simply to a working group aiming to negotiate text on what may become the preamble on the first page of the long-awaited treaty in December. Here there was a surprise for the traditional hard-left axis of the negotiations, the ALBA group, led by Bolivia and Venezuela and a handful of British Corbynistas. Usually the darlings of the NGO fringe at the negotiations, ALBA has always maintained that “Mother Earth” should be front and centre in the negotiations. But this time civil society launched a stinging attack on the flagrant gender bias of this imagery. Why Mother Earth? Should this not refer to Person Earth? Failing to find agreement on this, the text was duly bracketed to allow for Ministers to take a decision on this important issue: “[Mother][Father][Person][Single-parent] Earth and humankind’s treatment of [him][her][it]”.

Elsewhere in the negotiations, the traditional Youth constituency’s opposition to corporate influence in the negotiation process seemed to temporarily melt away as the UNFCCC’s latest corporate sponsor was rolled out complete with new greenwash flavour ice-cream. With delegates and observers tucking into side-by-side sundaes, the atmosphere turned rather festive. But with only a handful of negotiating days left before Paris, ce n’est pas gagné

June was a frenetic month for the UN climate negotiations with both Heaven and the People’s Republic of China coming forward with unexpectedly strong “contributions”. This coincidence of statements from the Celestial and Middle Kingdoms left liberal climate policy wonks in information overload and unsure about whether it was ok to praise the Pope and the Chinese regime.

The contributions were delivered by the second-most senior representative of each jurisdiction, namely Premier Li Keqiang and Pope Francis. Critics were quick to suggest that the lack of appearance of the top-dogs themselves shows a lack of respect for the issue and faltering political will at the highest level. Both God and President Xi Jinping were unavailable for comment, though some observers have pointed to the recent onslaught of hurricanes, heat-waves and other extreme weather events as an ominous indication of the Former’s view on the climate change matter.

Holy messenger holds up an excerpt from the Heavenly contribution on 4G-enabled tablets

Heaven’s contribution was revealed after the Pope went up a mountain and came down remarking that there really wasn’t much snow up there anymore and by the way here’s a statement inscribed on nearly 200 iStone tablets. Much of the opus demonstrated a remarkable and inspiring overview of the moral and scientific imperative for all of humanity to act on climate change. Only occasionally did it lapse into quoting from Genesis as though it actually happened.

Buried in the heavenly text was a clear message against the purchasing of carbon offsets as a means to solve the climate problem. This caused consternation among some Catholics shocked at such a clear departure from the centuries-old Catholic practice of quietly buying indulgences for the remission of sins. Carbon market investors were also perturbed. “This is a disaster. Since the bottom dropped out of the EU compliance market a few years back we’ve been relying on selling low-quality offset credits to guilt-ridden Catholics. If they are going to turn their backs on us, who are we going to flog them to next? Unsuspecting pensioners?” lamented one forlorn project developer.

China’s contribution goes beyond its previously announced vague promise that its CO2 emissions would peak sometime around 2030 (a.k.a the “Pek-ing” plan). The new version adds a precisely worded commitment about reducing emissions intensity by 60-65%, along with a lengthy shopping list of actions and targets that almost rivals the Pope for sheer verbosity. The admirable but hard-to-measure intensity target sent analysts into a frenzy of plotting and re-plotting pie-in-the-sky economic projections in exactly the same way as they did in 2009 when the previous 40-45% target was announced. In the intervening years we’ve learnt that nobody really knows how to measure Chinese emissions and economic output in China. But boy are we all happy to hear them making commitments about it.

An intensity target is naturally easier to reconcile with strong economic growth than an absolute emissions reduction target, such as the 40% target recently announced by the European Union after months of undignified internal bickering. The Europeans did though also see ambitious domestic action on climate change in June as one of the EU’s proudest member states selflessly stepped forward and offered complete economic collapse as its contribution to the EU’s climate plan. Jean-Claude Juncker said, “Just the other day someone told me about this climate change thing and said that we should do something about it. I’m now glad to report that our plan for the annihilation of the Greek economy is coming to fruition and with it excellent progress on total EU emissions reductions”.

The high-profile contributions from China and the People’s Republic of Heaven have upped the pressure on other major negotiating parties who are yet to announce contributions, such as India and Hell. Hell is said to be considering commitments related to energy efficiency in its thermal sector, notably by reducing operating temperature by a few degrees, as well as converting its furnaces to run on a new “anthropologic” biomass fuel. Previous hopes that the Kingdom of Hell would be able to further decrease emissions by reducing its population have been dashed as humanity shows never-ending enthusiasm for qualifying itself for entry to the fiery underworld. Not least those otherwise devout Catholics who ruined everything by dabbling in carbon credits.

The Indian government, for its part, is thought to be waiting for a strong commitment from Hell before coming out with a statement. A source close to Delhi reportedly said “We didn’t cause this mess. The historical responsibility lies with the US and Beelzebub. Let us first develop like they have!”

Citizens around the world have been reacting excitedly to the news of a measly compromise struck by their governments at the recent UN climate talks in Warsaw. Delirious from lack of sleep, delegates of the world’s governments agreed in the dying moments of the conference that they will no longer be making commitments to one another about action on climate change but will instead propose “contributions”. Worse, they went on to agree that these “contributions” should be put forward by early 2015, but “only by those Parties who are ready to do so”. So it’s whatever you want, whenever you want.

Unprecedented mass weddings have been held this week, as couples rush to tie the knot by making “contributions” instead of commitments

Inspired by this agreement, people everywhere have been rushing to apply the new international norm in all aspects of their lives. Many countries have seen a stampede of wedding applications this week, with thousands of young couples finally agreeing to make the leap now that they no longer need to make commitments to one another, choosing instead to propose vows based around contributions.

Governments themselves are even taking advantage of the new trend. For months the British government has been wondering how it can justify its u-turn from its 2010 election commitment to be the “greenest government ever” to its recent alleged efforts to rid itself of “green crap” policies. Easy! Those weren’t really commitments, you see, just contributions. And the contributions have got a bit smaller. Certainly no more huskies around.

Across the business world, bosses of small firms have been taking the opportunity to rid themselves of lazy staff members without needing to go through termination formalities. “You have an employment contract, you say? Oh that wasn’t really a commitment, we were just choosing to contribute your salary and now we’ve decided not to”. Meanwhile, in the corporate stratosphere, Vodafone reacted coolly to the world-wide frenzy. “This doesn’t change anything for us”, said a spokesperson, “we have always considered taxes to be a voluntary contribution, so what’s new?”

Across the pond, however, it seems that even Hollywood has proven fickle to this intercontinental vogue. Tinseltown has been awash with rumours that a remake of the famous 1991 movie about an Irish soul band is now underway, with a release of “The Contributions” scheduled for next year (but, the producer is said to have added, “only if we are ready”). The new film’s soundtrack is expected to include the hapless Dubliners playing covers of Carole King’s “It’s too late”, REM’s “It’s the end of the world as we know it” and “Here comes the flood” by Peter Gabriel.

The coalition of large developing countries mostly responsible for the wording change pose for a group photo shortly after negotiations concluded in Warsaw